The Three Pillars of Scrum
Understanding Empiricism in Agile Environments
Scrum is one of the most adopted agile frameworks used by organizations to deliver high-quality products to their customers faster and more often. Scrum is ideal for complex real-life problems. The extraordinary beauty of scrum lies in its simplicity. It is utilized productively by IT, marketing, HR, and other professionals irrespective of their roles.
Empiricism means working in a fact-based, experience-based, and evidence-based manner. Scrum implements an empirical process where progress depends on observations of reality, not fictitious plans. It emphasizes transparency, inspection, and adaption that leads to continuous improvement and effective teamwork. By contemplating these three foundational pillars, you can accurately determine how key objectives are achieved precisely for the consecutive implementation.
Transparency:
Scrum promotes transparency as it requires significant aspects of the process to be visible to those responsible for the outcome. Everyone on the team should understand the project goals and get involved in them fully to achieve the desired goal. Clear and understandable information must be available to all the colleagues that will be a part of the project. Management and teams should communicate with each other clearly to prevent any confusion.
Management should notify regarding all the concerns related to the project, data, values, time management, failures, clear-cut progress chats, and expected changes must be shared with team members. If team members are on the same page and are clear of their objectives of ‘What needed precisely?’. That team would surely be successful. It can progressively increase mutual trust among the team members and results in more engagement. Transparency is significant for inspection and adaption as well, as a team cannot inspect problems to improve and adapt changes if it is not transparent.
Inspection:
The inspection is a process of evaluation, review, and improvements at the end of each programmatic event. It requires that scrum users regularly inspect the progress and scrum artifacts to achieve the general goal and eliminate undesirable results. The team looks over what is status of the backlog items and identifies things to be improved. There are some tools like JIRA, Kanban, and Trello which help in tracking progress. Processes like scrum events, sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and retrospective are under the support of these three pillars. An inspection does not mean halting the progress and workflow but notifying the team of the possible problem that may arise.
Inspection applies to both development and product teams. The product team continuously remains in touch with the stakeholders and takes continuous feedback. It is necessary for the verification and validation of the desired product. The purpose of inspections is only improvements, not criticizing someone by expressing judgments. In this way, the team comes to recognize how they can improve in the future effectively.
Adaption:
Adaption constitutes the subsequent step to inspection as it encourages change and improvements as necessary. When some changes happen, priority task shifts, and goals change suddenly, the team regroup and adapts to changes in workflow, occasionally in strategy or sometimes in organizational climate. Scrum encourages the concept of Fail Fast. It supports the team identification process of the problematic issues and addresses them.
Adaption is impossible if the organization is not utilizing the proper tools or dares to carry out experiments to gain desired results. It is the only way they can revolutionize the way they can improve in their formerly existing faults.
Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like this article, then please share it with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note. If you found this article helpful, follow me on Medium, and LinkedIn for more ideas.
